Research Seminar: ‘Bad feeling in journalism: Moral injury and Context Switching’

Dr Richard Stupart argues for the existence of 'context switching' and moral injury as two novel forms of emotional harm that morally directed journalism may be particularly predisposed to

As part of the emotional turn in journalism studies (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019; Kotišová, 2019), much attention in journalism studies has been given to problems of 'bad feeling' suffered by journalists. This work has generally focused on experiences of trauma in general and - in cases of especially high-risk reporting - problems of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Drawing on the work of scholars and practitioners in the field of military and humanitarian affairs, Dr Richard Stupart argues for the existence of two distinct forms of bad-feeling that are inherent to forms of journalism that are especially morally committed: moral injury and 'context switching'. Distinct from both PTSD and ideas of trauma as currently conceived in journalism studies, Richard will argue that the existence of moral injury and context switching as 'bad feeling problems' for journalists points to an unavoidable entanglement between the moral commitments and phenomenological experience of journalistic practice. He suggests that both forms of bad feeling are not necessarily bound to only occur in 'high risk' beats (such as war or disaster reporting) but instead are inherent features of any reporting practice that is understood by those doing it as being especially morally significant.

Richard Stupart is a Lecturer at the University of Liverpool. His work is broadly interested in the practical and philosophical issues that arise when violence, media and ethics intersect. This includes work on the ethics and practices of witnessing in wartime and humanitarian situations; affect and emotion in journalism and media work; humanitarian communication; the mediation of war; ethics of humanitarian image-making and circulation and the epistemic structures of conflict spaces. Richard has previously worked at the Center for Media at Risk at the Annenberg School of Communication and the Center for Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Groningen. He has published in journals including Journalism, Journalism Practice and Media, War and Conflict and is currently a CODESRIA African Diaspora Fellow, chair of the ECREA temporary working group on the ethics of mediated suffering and an editor at the journal Media, War and Conflict.